Getting pcaps for your test cases

February 1, 2011 by enute

With Mu Studio, you can go from pcap to test creation in minutes. But how do you get the packet capture to start with?

With a little luck, or with a popular protocol, a pcap may already be on pcapr. Just do some searches, and you may find what you need.

Depending on what you need, you may be able to use Cap’r Mak’r to build the pcap. If you’re looking to test the filtering capabilities of a firewall, DPI, or UTM device, and you already have your desired payload, Cap’r Mak’r is a quick path to a pcap.

To run a test in Mu Studio, what we really need is MuSL. If you know what you want to test, it may be easier to use MuSL Builder to craft a Scenario than it is to set up the test network to capture the traffic.

Getting a packet capture is pretty easy, after the network is set up. Over at the MuDynamics Training Videos Library, near the bottom of the page, is the video “Clean Packet Captures with Mu Test Suite 5″. Basically, you can use the Mu Test Suite built-in Packet Recorder to capture your packet traffic, including 802.1Q headers that frequently get stripped by the Network Interface Card.

With traffic from Mobile Devices, it can get a little tricky, but kowsik documented one way of capturing the traffic. On the Windows side, there is ICS (Internet Connection Sharing), so you don’t need the l2bridge application. And if your mobile device won’t connect to an Ad-Hoc wifi network (i.e., most stock Android devices, it seems), borrow a wifi router and route it through the Mu Test Suite Packet Recorder.

Getting the pcap is just the first step, and generally you only need to do it once per interaction you want to test. Once you have the Scenario, you can then test service scalability with Studio Scale, perform functional tests with Studio Verify, and verify robustness and resiliency with Studio Fuzz, all with the same Scenario. Of course, it would be nice if the desired Scenario just appeared when you needed it. We’re working on that, too. Stay tuned.

Categories: pcapr, Studio, Testing, Training
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